Recommended Games

The Ticket

UN official who tied Boston bombings to Israel must go, U.S. says

A woman and her children walk past the site of the first explosion on Boylston Street in Boston, April 24, 2013. …

A top U.S. official called on Wednesday for the United Nations to fire a human rights advocate who implied that the Boston Marathon bombings were payback for America’s "geopolitical fantasy of global domination" and its friendship with Israel.

“Outraged by Richard Falk's highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN. Past time for him to go,” the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, said on Twitter.

Rice was responding to an essay that Falk, who is U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, wrote in Foreign Policy Journal. In it, Falk warns against "darkly glamorizing" the Boston bombings "with flowers and homage" and seems to say the U.S. brought the attacks on itself.

"The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world," Falk said. "In some respects the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to rethink US relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East."

"We should be asking ourselves at this moment, 'how many canaries will have to die before we awaken from our geopolitical fantasy of global domination?'" Falk wrote.

The U.N. official also condemned President Barack Obama's March 21 speech in Jerusalem as "a love letter to the Israeli public rather than qualifying as a good faith effort to demonstrate his belief in a just peace.

"The war drums are beating at this moment in relation to both North Korea and Iran, and as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy," he said.

Falk said he thought he detected "a few hopeful signs of awakening" in Americans asking whether policies like targeted assassination using drones might be turning other peoples against the United States.